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Semenza continued. "You can think of [it] as a widescreen version of the double-VGA format in the 4s," he said.

Another marquee upgrade will be in-cell touch tech. "Also, we expect the display to have in-cell touch, which means the touch sensor is integrated into the TFT array of the display, which we think can make the display about 0.5 mm thinner," he said.

And what kind of hardware is going to push those extra pixels around? It's not imperative that Apple upgrade the silicon to quad-core (CPU) to drive those pixels, especially since it didn't go that route on the third-generation 2048-by-1536 iPad (that's a dual-core CPU with a quad-core GPU).

But only Apple knows what Apple thinks is imperative. We'll revisit that chip-specific speculation later.